I never really acquired a real aptitude for it, but I’ve had a fascination with neuroscience, even after I left premed to become and English major (because it seems that at some point in the summer after high school, my right brain devoured my left, and I went from being a balanced student to a great English student with no aptitude for science. So it goes). I look at it from a writer’s point of view, as the mechanics behind the human experience. I’m always fascinated with instances of some sort of deficit in this experience. Narratives such as “Flowers for Algernon” and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night” are written from the perspective of someone with major neurological impairments. And because I’m interested in narrative perspective, perception is very relevant to my interest in writing. That’s why I took this class. For my final blog entry, I researched a question I had earlier about depression and pain pathways.
Depression is, psychologically speaking, a condition of mental disturbance charactarized by feelings of despondancy to a degree and duration longer than environmental circumstances would otherwise dictate, and it is both biological and genetic. From a writer’s standpoint, it is an internal conflict that has no external resolution, which explains why so many major characters in literature can be judged as suffering from depression. It’s a fascinating literary struggle.
As neuroscience progresses, we are building bridges between the physical world and the metaphysical world. For example, perception is now equally important to both biologists and philosophers, whereas it was strictly the realm of the latter a few hundred years ago. So, then, have we correlated the nature of physical pain, which we studied in depth in perception, and its emotional correlate, depression. This article by Michael Jann and Julian Slade investigates the use of antidepressants in treating chonic pain with antidepressants cites a very high correlation between depression and chronic nociceptive pain.
Antidepressants can be used to treat chronic pain. This fact alone suggests nociceptive pain, especially over long periods of time, activates not only pain pathways, which, evolutionarily speaking, act as a warning system. In the same way, depression occasionally acts as a warning system. For example, poor diet, excersize, and/or sleep habits can act as environmental triggers of depression. The antithesis is true; that good died, exercise, and sleep habits can in some cases treat and even alleviate depression. This is a different evolutionary perspective from the more typically accepted evolutionary argument, which is that the symptoms of depression (hypersomnia, decreased metabolism), may have been helpful in getting evolutionary ancestors through winters. Seasonal Affect working FOR us!
In this way, and in so many others, the human brain is geared to care for the body, both in the short-and-long term. This provides a depth of understanding to pain, not only of the nociceptive variety, but of the emotional kind. And this helps us understand that our perception is our greatest conscious tool in caring for our own existence.
